Political Penguin

Here’s the deal. I’ve long since stopped reading anything from the right-wing blogosphere, not that I ever read much anyway and I’ll be perfectly honest; I’d never even heard of this Donal Blaney geezer before this morning but as people seemed to be talking about him a bit on Twitter I thought I’d have a quick gander at what all the fuss was about.

Have I got this right, the Guardian wrote an article about him (haven’t read it) and he cropped up saying it had led to £10,000 worth of donations to his Young Britons’ Foundation group thingy. I’ve got that all right haven’t I?

So with a mild bit of curiosity I decided to have a look and see who this Donal Blaney chappy was by having a good read through his blog, which he appears to have taken offline or restricted  to invited visitors only but hey ho it’s not like that was hard to get round. It’s hard where to start, and quite frankly after reading a few articles I did wonder if the guy existed at all or was some sort of hilarious parody of a right-wing neo-con but I take it that he’s not which is both rip-roaringly funny and worrying in equal measure.

Of course this led me to his Young Britons’ Foundation which I can’t quite make out how British it is to be organising trips to the US for young Tories/Right-wing types to play with sub-machine guns which isn’t quite as quintessentially an image of what it is to be British as for example; having a polite chat over a cup of tea and biscuits but perhaps I’ve got some weird leftie-commie-fascist-nazi-za-nu-labour twisted interpretation of Britishness going on.

This aside, and quite frankly a serious fisking of this guy or his organisation really isn’t needed, it’s pure self-satirising kind of stuff but as I’ve mentioned before, I run my web browser with Javascript turned off by default (security measure). So every time I turn up at a new website for the first time I have to consciously allow Javascript from that site to be executed in my browser. In the case of the Young Britons’ Foundation I decided not to in the end. Although it wouldn’t have had any harmful effect my end anyway. You see, when you run a browser without Javascript, it often rips out stuff from sites meaning you can’t use things like Flash embedded videos or Javascript menus until you allow it. It also from time to time reveals things that were Javascript to be enabled, would normally be invisible.

In the case of the Young Britons’ Foundation, the latter turned out to be true, because running without Javascript gives you this: (click for a bigger more legible image)

It’s the old classic hidden Javascript spam linkage routine. In days gone by, people who were lazy/crap at SEO (Search Engine Optimsation) used to do this a fair bit. Hide a load of keywords with internal site linkage to try and up the rankings. Just out of curiosity I had a quick shufty round their site’s coding and they are up to date on their version of WordPress so if they’re lucky it’s a dodgy plugin, or if they’re not lucky then it could have been there since last Summer when there was that major security issue and quick patches were rushed out. In which case they’ll probably need that £10,000 to pay some proper techies to sort the problem out as it may have completely screwed their backend database.

So I’m afraid, they’re really not worth a good fisking because they are so truly laughable to start with, but a good old point and laugh at a bunch of neo-cons who are punting out dodgy links to viagra and the usual list of weird named stuff I’ve never heard of. Me thinks they need to find a good techie quick. Note, I’m not available.